hollerith

I concede that by itself it is very weak evidence, but Star Trek is mentioned alot on HN, and I've never seen an instance of anyone on HN having made a non-critical mention of it questioning the value or prudence of any major technological development.

BTW I used Rayiner for 2 of my examples because I make a point to read all his comments because he is generally insightful, not because he is a particularly egregious example of unquestioning support for all instance of techological "progress".

>But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".

But then why didn't he write what you wrote? His citing Star Trek in his reply suggests that Star Trek is affecting how he thinks about the issue being discussed.

>The social side was much less impactful

I'm not so sure.

I was once in a long conversation in which my interlocutor was trying to get me to support socialism during which my interlocutor asked me to envision a future society "like Star Trek" then looked at me expectantly as if he had some hope that that would bring me around or at least soften my stance.

Beyond inspiring enthusiasm for socialism, it seemed to have inspired an unquestioning support for technological development:

Consider for example this comment by someone (rayiner) who is certainly capable of subtle thought, but who believed it would be a good reply to worries about the effect of the current crop of AI assistants on the psychology of children to write, "it's literally like the computer in Star Trek": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326105

Or this comment by the same author in which he asserts that "we need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. . . . Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships" (which most of us would judge to be at least a little reckless with the environment). An then in a follow-up comment writes, "getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49820988

If Roddenberry's Star Trek (i.e., The Original Series and the first 4 seasons of The Next Generation) were merely more delusional than most works of sci-fi, we probably wouldn't be discussing it now. You and I consider it worth talking about because Roddenberry's Star Trek has had been extremely influential. I would maintain that that influence has been very negative: it is has made people more zealous and ideological -- and not just about socialism.

The straw man said.

I agree. Roddenberry was a genius at inspiring enthusiasm for a vision of the future that is delusional in the Maoist way and in other fundamental ways.

Our critics (e.g. thoughtful sci-fi authors like David Brin) should have criticized Roddenberry much more strenuously than they actually did.

I won't miss it.

I hate how the site clutters every page with hundreds of shiny tokens whose only purpose is gamification (with no way to turn the gamification off in site settings).

I now read the answers to my technical questions from Emacs buffers containing ASCII text only.

APA == the Administrative Procedure Act, enacted by Congress in 1946.

An unreliable source writes, "litigants frequently use the Administrative Procedure Act to argue that an agency acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, failed to follow required notice-and-comment procedures, or exceeded its statutory authority."

>That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not a USA-ian, and explain it in simple terms.

Not only is he a USA-ian, but also he routinely makes arguments to US Federal judges very similar to the argument he is making here or at least he is a colleague and coworker of people who do.

>comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate

How is a very large operation more efficient at producing comic-book sales than a smaller operation?

Why cannot new comic-book companies easily be created? One guess I have is that most of the profit potential is in sales of new stories about characters that are well-known, like Superman or the Incredible Hulk, and copyright law prevents new entrants from selling those stories.

Sure, but Anthropic never announced that it will never return capital to investors; did it?

My recollection is that "globalization" was a buzzword in the early 1980s although there is a possibility I am not accurately assigning my memories to the right range of years.

It was often paired with another term which I cannot confidently recall, maybe "the information economy".

Although Chinese imports didn't become an important factor in the US economy till the 1990s, Deng's rise to power happened in 1978 and his famous "Southern Tour" happened in 1982. Both events committed China to a course of economic modernization, welcoming Western investment and special economic zones designed to boost exports, which the US media did not fail to notice.

Trump was the first president in the modern era to try to stem the flow of factory jobs overseas. Clinton for example was all-in on globalization.

It seemed to me that the Democrats of the 1980s achieved almost nothing to stop or to slow down the biggest threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely low-skilled immigration and offshoring (then called "globalization").

A no-dividends policy is nothing new.

Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, and Palo Alto Networks have never paid a dividend at any point in their histories as publicly traded companies.

Advanced Micro Devices hasn't paid one since 1995, Adobe since 2005.

The extra volume can be air like it is in most consumer electronics.

If you're going to assert that Facebook needs to be split up, you should explain how you would do that (if you were completely in charge of the splitting) while continuing to provide at least most of its current users with a service somewhat resembling what they have now.

>The company is in desperate need of splitting up.

Walk me through that. In 1999, some people proposed splitting up Microsoft. One spinoff would own Internet Explorer, another would own the office suite, a third would own Windows.

You could spin off Instagram and Whatsapp, but after you do that, Facebook is still really big -- worth many 100s of billions. How to split that up?

Every user east of the Mississippi ends up in Facebook East and every user to the west in Facebook West??

Facebook didn't become large through mergers.

OK, to be more precise: it would still have a market cap of "multiple hundred billions of dollars" if it never acquired or merged with any other companies.

Huh? China received tons of investment from US investors and benefited greatly from the US decision to grant China free access to the US market.

The US is self-sufficient in oil, so naturally it hasn't invested as heavily in risky ventures to reduce its dependence on oil as a country that gets most of its oil from a long supply line (past potentially hostile powers like India) to the Persian Gulf and even further through to Russia's European ports.

>If these three CEOs truly believed their models were approaching consciousness and posed an extinction risk, they would slow down. But that’s not the case—they’re releasing models faster than ever, because they can’t let those “distillers” get too far ahead of their paid products. Public statements are one thing; actual actions are another. When the two contradict each other, trust the actions.

Is it not cherry picking to focus on 3 CEOs and ignore the 145,132 people who signed a "call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence":

https://superintelligence-statement.org/

Does the opinion of these 145,132 people not count because they're not CEOs of AI megacorporations?

Also, people can be so consumed with the pursuit of wealth and power (and sometime attention) that they can't bring themselves to voluntarily stop that pursuit even when they know that stopping is the right thing to do.

>AI boosters look at currently high profit margins on inference

Name a company with a currently high profit margin on inference. I can't.

OpenAI and Anthropic's valuations are as high as they are because investors hope that they will create AI that is much much more powerful than the AI they have now. The fact that they already have a substantial revenue stream helps, but it helps mainly by lending credibility to the hope that they might create something much much more powerful.

(You, Mike and I agree that selling the inference of models that are not much better than liberally-licensed open-weights models will be a low-margin business.)

That is a strange collection of hills to die on or to defend by blatantly illiberal means.

This American thinks France is doing a pretty good job at being a country.

Through good planning, France weathered the supply shock around Russian natural gas better than most of Europe.

No military dares to fuck with France.

Life in France for the average person is good. Many want to move there. Many want to visit.

France functions better than I would have thought possible of a country so attracted to Leftism and 'direct political action'.

>American politics runs on promising voters free stuff without higher taxes

I would phrase it differently: democratic elections everywhere tend to be won by promising free stuff, and even the US is not immune to this tendency.

During the first 140 years of democratic elections in the US, the average voter got approximately zero free stuff. E.g., when the Dust Bowl made 100s of 1000s of families completely destitute, they received no substantial assistance from (state or Federal) governments: the free stuff started flowing a couple of years after that when FDR took office.

BTW the US economy was already 3 times the size of the next largest economy (the UK) at the start of the Dust Bowl.

One reason the democratic disease of free stuff took so long to manifest in the US is that the disease is largely incompatible with the central principle of the US theory of governance, namely, to maximize freedom for the average person.

Another reason is that life was easier for the average person in the US than it was almost anywhere else in the world. E.g., there were no invasions by Mongols, Teutonic Knights, Tatars, Turks, Finns, Swedes or Napoleonic armies that severely interfered with millions of lives as was the case in Russia. (Native Americans never posed a comparable military threat to European settlers. E.g., they never took and held a settler city or even a settler town that I know of.)

maybe he was technophile cult. OpenAI has as many ideological technophiles as it has doomers/shutdownists.

Did you read the OP? It does not advocate for any new law and claims A\ is now able to stop 99.9% of distillation attempts.

All the other tech billionaire are jealous: they all want their own recursively-self-improving megacorporation.

Rust (like C) gives the programmer more control over computer cycles and memory than Ruby, Python and JVM languages do, which some might be describing as a "performance advantage".

By "self-determination", I didn't mean democracy. I meant Putin's successor will be determined mostly by Russians, not Chinese people, Americans or Central or Western Europeans.

Russians decided that the tsar would be overthrown in 1917, that the Bolsheviks would take power, that Lenin would be replace by Stalin, Krushchev, . . . , Yeltsin, Putin.

The US, Britain, France and Japan actually invaded Russia (circa 1918) to try to influence the outcome of a transition of power without success.

None of the transitions I described depended on which leader or which faction had funding from outside Russia. I expect Russian self-determination to continue. Nationalism is a very potent force in most countries, Russians seem more nationalistic than average, and the Russian ethnicity is firm in control of the country, which increases stability and nationalism.

Just because Russia has declined in influence relative to the great powers doesn't mean it will break up or stop exercising self-determination.